The Fifty Fourth Year
by gnails
Summary: It was a past and future thing, Jack calmly muses. This is how he doesn't let go. Spoilers for Children of Earth.


_major spoilers for series 3, children of earth. un-beta'd. i have no idea where i was going with this._

_

* * *

_

He's somewhere along the delta sector of the Callisto galaxy. Relative to a floating green and blue ball he one time called home, he was maybe about eight hundred years into the future. Linear-wise, that is. He's not sure. For being a fixed point in space and time, he never did remember how long or for how _much _longer.

He always was a lousy time agent.

Or possibly he forgot because he could. The thing about being immortal, it was easy to forget. After a while, things blurred together in a coalescing smear of repeatable memories. He remembered names. He remembered faces. He remembered memories as hazy, static things that were easier to translate into words, embellished with artificial story-telling.

But the emotions brought on were violent and vibrant. The ache in his chest was a deep shade of red, and the wistful memory of fingers skimming his forehead was a yellow. A pale, iridescent yellow, like whenever the second sun hit the Boeshane horizon just before dark.

It comes and goes like the ebb and flow of the Cardiff bay at the end of an arduous day. That much, he remembers.

Jack's somewhere. Perhaps nowhere. He doesn't know. It's been a long time. But not as long as his life will ever be. That sad fact is his fundamental way of living.

The land is barren and rocky. The air is fresh with miniscule grains of dirt, flowing up his nostrils. The ochre color reminds of him Mars three thousand years into the future, when all of its orange of the twentieth century is bled out from the characteristic red. Mars reminds him of Earth.

Earth reminds him of—  
_  
__Are there such things as Martians?_ Ianto queries one day, his lips pursed and obviously bored with rift monitoring.

_No. _Ianto shifts in his chair and swivels, facing Jack. He sighs, putting down his reports for the PM. _There will be a time when—_

Jack can't feel time swirling at his feet, as he thinks the Doctor could—can-does—but he wishes that for being such a stick in time's bum, he was at least entitled to somehow calculate the hours, minutes, seconds before he is unstuck and unglued and stops being such an extreme spectrum of life. Before he is dissipated into the elements that will make up the chemical composition of the universe and scatter across space, but not time. As if he were a variable, indeterminate and swinging from opportunity to opportunity like the people he loved.

He deludes himself. It will never happen. He is as constant as the physics of time itself. He'll live to the end of time. It doesn't frighten him because he's made his peace years ago. But he screams into the vista anyway, and he pours out his soul like how others—mortals—pour out their lives.

The landscape echoes back at him, the wind hitting his ears in a whispering screech. His boot pounds the ground, toeing the grit beneath him. Jack inhales. Oxygen, nitrogen, carbon, a passing taste of argon. In the far distance, he could almost smell and taste coffee and the bitter, nostalgic sepia of fleeting sadness.

He wants to fade. He doesn't want to forget. He wants—

* * *

Jack closes his eyes. He closes them to stop the quickening flurry of thoughts and half-formed memories from mixing and threatening to disappear.

* * *

"Jack." A hand pulls him back from teetering on the edge of a yawning crevice.

Jack blinks, turning around.

He's younger this time. His hair isn't as distinct as a pompadour's red cape any more. Bigger forehead, thinner lips, and gray eyes peering back at him with the same manic fascination that never changed between regenerations. The same manic, sorrowful eyes.

"Doctor?" Jack hoarsely asks. He hasn't spoken any coherent language in twenty years. The sound waves tickle his throat, making his larynx throb like an old wound. Screaming, he is used to. But the softness of speech eludes him for a moment as he readjusts and swallows.

"Jack, are you all right?" The Doctor firmly shakes him, as if proving to himself that Jack was real.

"Yes. No. It's been a long time. How are you?" Jack stretches out his arm in a placating offer. The Doctor glances at his hand, and for a short second, hesitates. Then he takes it and steadfastly shakes Jack's hand.

"Jack," the Doctor says, concerned. "Are you really all right? You seem—"

Jack lets go. He waves the Doctor off with his hand, the tattered leather around his wrist barely hanging on. "I'm fine. I'm…fine."

He massages his throat, pushing his fingers along the sides of his Adam's apple, quietly looking down into the crevice and its unending darkness, appearing as eternal as himself.

The Doctor rocks back on to his heels. He watches Jack warily. "It's time to leave."

He ushers Jack into the TARDIS. Jack pauses at the entrance of the blue police box, staring at it with a look of keen marvel.

"Hello," he whispers.

The Doctor gently nudges him in. Jack isn't pushed back out, as he expected, but welcomed by the soft bleeps of a working TARDIS. The golden glow of the inside reminds him of his adventures with Rose, the Ninth Doctor, and of moments when life wasn't as complicated as it was now.

The Doctor picks up a blanket folded over a ledge and throws it to Jack. Then he sets off to the console, busying himself with the next destination that somehow will end up with him saving a planet, freeing oppressed creatures from tyrants, or enjoying a holographic laser show in the forty-third century.

"What are you doing here?" Jack croaks. He wraps the blanket around him and his dirty clothes and sits down at a step leading up the TARDIS's pillar.

"You called me and told me to pick you up fifty-four years later. Where ever you were. I had expected you to be at the Thathni resort in the other galaxy. It took me some time to find you. But, here we are!"

"Oh. Right."

The Doctor frowns at Jack's listlessness.

"If you don't mind me asking Jack." His timbre is lower and hums along with the TARDIS. "Why fifty-four years?"

"I don't know. I just…picked an arbitrary amount of time."  
_  
__Give me a random fact. _Jack brushes Ianto's hair with his fingers while they lie in bed, burnt out like ashy pieces of wood and exhausted down to their very bones.

_Fifty-four. _

Jack affectionately taps Ianto on the side of his head. _Fifty-four is a number. I said fact._

_I was getting to that. _Ianto's amusement radiates stronger than his exasperation. He swats Jack's hand away and nestles into the space between Jack and the bed. _It's the smallest sum of three squares. __  
_  
Jack wrangles Ianto's arm around his chest and happily grins at him. _Hm. That's interesting.__  
_  
_And random enough, yeah? _  
_  
__Yeah. _

The Doctor gives Jack a long hard stare. He doesn't find the answer acceptable, but turns back to the console and says nothing. He lifts a lever, and the TARDIS groans in response. Satisfied, he disappears into a hallway and reappears again with a teacup and saucer.

"A cuppa always helps me after a…bad time." He offers the cup to Jack.

Jack dryly chuckles, surprised he is even able to laugh. He takes the tea. "There was once a man who worked for me who I swore lived off of caffeine."

"What was his name?"

"Ianto. His name was Ianto." Jack cringes. Of course. His name was Ianto. It was a detail buried deep under layers and layers of murky experiences. He hears the faintest sigh of Welsh vowels, structured on green lyrical lifts.

"What happened?" he asks, his compassion like a laser knife to Jack's gut.

Jack takes time to think. He remembers Alice. He remembers Steven. The children. The screaming. "The four-five-six."

"I see. Well." The Doctor knows.

He knows everything, and it hurts. He doesn't condescend Jack about his decisions, but his opinion of mankind has dwindled. They never change. Always the same with their selfish priorities and wicked deals. The Doctor takes off his blazer and sets it down next to a screen of the space-time continuum. He leans over the console, and a thought whizzes by.

"I'm surprised she even let you in." It takes Jack a moment to realize that the Doctor is talking about the TARDIS.

Jack doesn't respond. Instead, he slouches over, feeling a sickly purplish exhaustion, the hue of a day-old bruise. He lays down and rests his head on the metal ground.

* * *

When he wakes up, he instinctively squints his eyes from the overwhelming intensity of light, streaming out of the console. He groggily gets up and walks to it, hearing a monotonous blip, blip, blip sound.

"Doctor?"

He automatically jumps back when a curve of light makes its way up his foot. It subconsciously repulses Jack, perhaps because of the inherent knowledge that this is what created him to be him. The light is alive, crawling and measuring each of Jack's actions. His heart rate rises, and his breathing rapidly becomes shallower.

The time vortex doesn't wrap itself around Jack's ankle. It snaps at him, breaking pieces off of itself like embers off of a dying fire. They float up, small fireflies lighting up the shadows and wrinkles of his face.

He twirls around. His surroundings hemorrhage like dripping paint as reality becomes unglued.

_No_, he thinks. He is unglued. The blues around him seep into the oranges, the purples are dyed with yellow, and the colors swirl together in an increasingly frenetic energy. They spin and spin. He loses sight of the TARDIS pillar as a strange cacophony of rushing wind, the movement of the protons, neutrons, and electrons in his bones, rushes through him.

It was a past and future thing, Jack calmly muses. This is how he doesn't let go. He doesn't understand it himself, doesn't understand what it means or why he thinks of it, but if he remembers his quantum mechanics well from his days in the academy, time was converging to him. A fixed point. Like a needle holding an endlessly spinning wheel together.

Everything veers to him. The ground under his feet tilts and stretches out like viscous liquid. He senses the TARDIS moving beneath him, pulsating with endless possibilities of the past and future. The present morphs. Colors fly by him at mach speed.

He almost comprehends what is happening. One thing he sure of: his entitlement comes in a warping tunnel of shimmering white light.

_White is what happens when you mix all the colors possible together._ Ianto twists the string running through the center of a circular disk made of thick paper. _Watch. _

Jack watches the slices of saturated, rainbow colors, bright and happy like a child's plaything, churn until there's nothing left but blank white. Jack wonders if Steven would be entertained as well. _Where'd you get that? __  
_  
_Mica gave it to me. _Ianto grins at him, a wry and proud twist of the lips that Jack was never able to get out of his head.  
_  
__That's neat. Do it again. _

Jack blinks. A flash of light sears his eyelids in the nanosecond he shuts them.

Ianto looks up from his desk after the twine has been all spun out and the circle stops moving. It hangs useless in the air.

"Jack?" Ianto asks, voice muzzy as if he were under water and behind opaque glass.

Jack reaches out.

He presses his fingers against a barrier, invisible and tangible, before he stretches out his palms. He stares, water brimming and red circling the white of his eyes.

Ianto knits his brow. He's young, still so young and beautifully alive. "Jack?"

"I never forgot you," Jack tells Ianto, his voice bouncing against the surface before him. His voice slows down as it reflects and rockets into the space around him. He watches the sound waves unfurl and come undone, tunneling through the air, shattering atoms.

Jack tips forward when the barrier breaks, shattering without a sound.

His hand lands on Ianto's chest, near the apex of his blue, paisley-patterned tie. He can feel silk, slippery under his touch. He traces the Windsor knot up to Ianto's jaw with bristling stubble.

"Ianto," Jack breathes out. He notices something over his shoulder, and looks up. "God, we're in the hub," he laughs.

"Jack, what's going on?" Ianto's voice is clear and precise. Each note of his words reaches the right resonance, and relief washes over Jack.

"I don't know." He leans down and presses his mouth to Ianto's. "You're so warm," he murmurs. He slides his hands down Ianto's neck and kisses him again.

Ianto twists away. "What is up with you today? And what the bloody hell is happening?"

"I think we're outside of time. Or maybe inside of time where the past, future, and present merge together. I'm not sure."

Ianto opens his mouth to say something about insanity and peculiarities. Yet, the stopwatch on Ianto's desk melts and slips down the leg of the desk, congealing at the bottom in small globules. Stunned, Ianto observes the measured slide down. He touches the leg. Liquid metal coats his fingertips. It curls around his hand, moving against physics and logic.

"A present," Ianto suddenly says, dawning upon a realization. "It's a present."

"From who?"

Ianto shrugs, more confused than Jack is. "Time?" He tilts his head up, his ear straining to hear something. Jack watches him, puzzled. "It's a present," he says, slowly extending his words. "For you."

A silhouette flickers in the corner of Jack's eye. His vision follows it. A glistening wisp vanishes under a work table by the autopsy bay.

Suddenly, Jack's legs nearly give out, melting into putty. He lets go of Ianto and slams his hand against the desk to keep himself upright. He watches with a bizarre interest as the molecules of the table break apart. Cellulose, primarily made up of polymerized sugars known as carbohydrates. CH2O. Little bits and pieces that make up matter, floating around his palm.

His solid hand dips into the collapsing bonds, glowing an ethereal shade of heavenly yellow.

He reaches out his other hand to balance himself against Ianto. His arm swishes through vacant space.

Ianto stands several feet away, his jacket discarded and hands diving in his trouser pockets. He looks ragged, standing in front of a looming metal and glass box, in a room of empty tables, chairs, and equipment that is buzzing. The creature in the box hides in indigo and toxic fumes, and the outline of its form casts a shadow over Ianto.

Beside Ianto, Steven, his wonderful grandson Steven, holds onto Ianto's hand, his red jacket disheveled and blonde hair lit like a halo from the sparse lamps. Jack hears the remote sound of a child screaming and his daughter crying, _no, no, help him, help him, please help him._

"Jack," Ianto says, expressionless.

"What—what is this?" A panic creeps into Jack's words. He points trembling finger at Ianto wearing the same pinstripe suit he died in and sporting the same gash along his cheekbone that he died with. "You're dead. Oh God, you're supposed to be _dead_."

Ianto's mouth slopes up. His blue, pastel eyes light up like the way the time vortex weaves in and out of the ground, the walls, matter, and reality built off of recollections and forgotten memories.

Ianto peacefully shakes his head. "No. Just waiting."

He looks down at Steven. Steven smiles back at Ianto before turning his attention to Jack. "Yeah, Uncle Jack."

"What are you talking about?"

"Remember? You promised."

"I don't understand!" Jack wants to run to the man and shake him until his bones are rattling, because what's real anymore? But his feet are rooted to the ground, his leather boots, the same ones he wore when he died from an alien virus in a room exactly like the one he's standing in, ages ago in Thames House, start growing vines and melt to the floor.

Ianto speaks as if he were in a completely different conversation. "I love you."

"Me too, Uncle Jack!" Steven's smile stretches out, excited as a child should be, showing his baby teeth and gaps as his expression illuminates the room.

Ianto gives one last smile, the type that he always gives Jack during those rare moments they had to themselves, as if they lived their lives without the pretenses of Torchwood, aliens, mortality, pasts, presents, futures. They turn around and walk into the box, their images fading once they stepped past the threshold.

"No, no, no no nonono. Steven! Ianto!"

Jack lunges after him, disregarding his feet fastened to the ground.

He sharply lands on his knees and hands and hears his kneecaps shatter. He hisses harshly. His wrists throb in searing, crimson pain.

Jack hears silence. Dead silence like the blackest parts of deep space, past the Omega galaxies and Hades belt of stars and into the spirit of the universe no living being dares to tread into.

He lifts his head. A yellow placard with the number fourteen printed on it obliquely looks at him, next to an unmoving body cover by a red blanket. He crawls up to it, ignoring the screeching, dying pain in his limbs.

He holds his breath as he pulls the blanket. He knows, he knows who it'll be, but it doesn't stop him because the motions are there and he cannot stop.

The cover effortlessly slides away, uncovering Ianto, pallid and lifeless.

Jack blanches and sharply gasps, gulping in air. He looks around; his eyes wildly scan the gym full of dead corpses laid out in neat rows and covered in cruel red sheets, overlooked by harsh storm lights. Old memories chime in Jack's mind like remote bells in a clock tower hitting midnight.

_Don't—_"-go." He grasps Ianto face in his hands as his voice quavers desperately, and salty water drips from his eyes. His words synchronize with a flutter of memories, soft as the beat of a butterfly's wing. "Don't go. Don't leave me—" _–please._  
_  
__In a thousand years time, you won't remember me. _

"No. I promised. I remember everything. I remember you. I _remember_."

Ianto tries to smile in an attempt to console Jack, because in the end it was just them. At least that was enough.

Ianto's features begin trickling away, the colors falling out of Jack's hands like liquid, leaving emptiness behind. Jack frantically gropes the space Ianto once occupied. He's rewarded with nothingness. Colors twirl together in an increasing rhythm, matched to the heart of the vortex, the very essence of time, until there is nothing left except for white.

The ground swallows him whole, and Jack is diving through white. He tears through space-time until he lands next to the TARDIS console, reality still shifting like an image reflected off of water. His body thuds on impact. He picks himself up and then follows after the vortex.

"You're not getting away. You're not—"

The time vortex recedes back into the base of the pillar. Jack slams the console and furiously claws at the pillar, yanking off metal plates and pulling at wires, snapping them and shredding the innards of the console in a mess.

"I deserve at least this much!" he screams.

The vortex halts its retreat to the core of the TARDIS.  
_  
__Yes_, it reverberates. Its white tendrils flicker in and out, swaying to the beat of his heart and his life. It thrusts forward and slices right through him, cutting his very cells in half. _Hey, it's been good, yeah?_

Jack gasps. His muscles spasm in convoluted motions as the sensation of pure, unadulterated time erupts in his body.

* * *

Jack awakens with the smallest snatch of air. He groans, feeling cotton-mouthed and fuzzy-minded. He slowly opens his eyes, pixel by minute pixel, almost scared of what he is going to see.

He is met with a massive shape of a memorable navy blue. His feet rub against the cotton, old and worn like an adage, and Jack knows where he is. He curls into the sheets and inhales a familiar scent he hasn't smelt in decades mounted upon decades. He wrenches out a sob, the noise coming from deep within his chest.

A hand soothingly lands on his back.

"Jack," a voice speaks in a Swansea accent, gentle and maternal. It's been a long time since he last heard her.

Jack quickly sits up while wiping face. "Gwen. Where—what am I…" He rubs his eyes, clearing out specks of bouncing, graduated lights from his vision.

He's nowhere. Perhaps somewhere. Jack doesn't know if the Doctor left him here, or he's been jumping through hoops made of mind tricks that force his sanity to crack at the edges. He feels everything.

"How were your travels?" Gwen smiles, showing the gap between her teeth. He notices the supple curve of fabric stretched over her protruding belly, larger than the last time he saw her.

Jack touches her hand. His index fingers brushes past the smooth metal of her wedding ring, warm from her skin. It anchors him to reality.

"It's good to see you." He means it. He honestly means it. Jack tries to match up her face with the one his memories, and he's thankful it's the same.

"He's waiting for you," she says softly.

"Who?" he rasps. He clears his throat. "Is it the Doctor?"

She nods her head, her eyes wide and pretty. "I'm afraid he's going to break my tea kettle. Rhys is having a bit of trouble. Could you…?"

"Don't worry. He's harmless to kitchen appliances." A smile flitters across Gwen's face before settling. She hugs him. He buries his face in the crook of her neck, feeling secure and held together for the first time.

"It's good to see you too," she says over his shoulder. She moves back to have a proper look at him, at his defined face and the stubble along his jaw line. "How long have you been gone?"

"Couple of decades. The last planet I was on, some moon orbiting a forest planet, I was there for…a long time."

"How do you feel?"

Jack halts and closes his eyes, sorting out his thoughts. "Tired," he says.

"Are you…okay?" she tentatively asks.

Jack slowly shakes his head, almost as if clearing his mind of translucent cobwebs. He orients himself on the axis of Gwen's presence, and the last of the vortex's hold fails.

"He's really dead, isn't he? They all are." Gwen doesn't reply but rather bows her head. It's still so fresh for her. Jack sharply inhales and pulls the navy sheets off, ones he personally picked out for Ianto and the bed, because the old ones were getting too ratty. It pools at his feet. He disentangles himself from Gwen and walks past Ianto's dresser, ignoring the pictures of his family, Gwen, Toshiko, Owen, himself.

"Are you going to stay Jack?" Gwen asks before Jack leaves the room.

He doesn't answer.

* * *

He picks up his greatcoat from the couch in Ianto's living room and sits down. He thumbs the dirty wool, unable to see the strands and the things that made up the strands and smaller and so on. It relieves him that he is out of the surreal. The carpet under his toes is material, and the couch exists.

The Doctor paces in front of the coffee table, rambling and occasionally stopping to take a sip of tea.

"I found you dead next to the console's filtration tubes. Then without a word, she—the TARDIS sent us here! Well, not here _here_, but outside." The Doctor leaps from tangent to tangent. "There's something that's going on with her…"

"The time vortex came out of nowhere," Jack interrupts.

"The time vortex?"

"It was like walking through a dream. I might've been hallucinating."

Something pulses at the tempo of his blood as it circulates through his body, from heart to capillary. The Doctor narrows his eyes, abruptly aware. The Doctor crouches in front of Jack and waves a light from the sonic screwdriver in his eyes.

"No, not at all."

"What are you talking about?"

"I think what happened to you was very real."

Jack looks beyond the Doctor. He sees Ianto, casually standing with his arms crossed, dressed in the same three-piece suit he died in, a dark, steel gray, white stripes, and a blue—so vividly blue-tie. Jack tenses.

"You can't see him?"

"Who Jack?"

"Him." He lifts his chin. The Doctor spins around, each moment passing in pieces Jack could count. Time slows to a crawling speed and then stops, leaving the Doctor half-way pivoting on his foot and arms out. Jack sees threads of glowing light around The Doctor in an ornate design.

He stands, setting down his coat and watches Ianto blink and relax behind a mesh of hues and shades and saturated pigments, concrete and physical.

His breath hitches. He can taste the composition of the air and feel the transparent dust next to his body from days of stagnancy.

"What's going on?"

"A present."

"Don't give me that. What is going on?"

"It's a gift Jack. I don't know why. I don't know how."

"A gift? A gift where I see my dead boyfriend in…memories and makeshift surroundings where I'm reliving every mistake I caused. Where reality is torn apart and put together at the most fundamental level, and keep remembering everyone who died-I'm going _crazy_—Ianto, I can't do this."

"Boyfriend? Well, that clears up things," Ianto says lightly.

"Ianto—"

"You know how when you responded 'don't', to that one thing I had to get off my chest before dying?"

Jack doesn't like the taste of where the conversation is heading, rich enough to choke him on the flavor and bittersweet. "Stop it Ianto."

"What did you mean by that? 'Don't.'"

"You're not real. And this doesn't make any sense."

"Since when did it? You always did avoid the subject and run away." Ianto's voice echoes and resounds, forcing the atoms in the air to quiver. It forces the cavity in Jack's chest to thrum and ache so terribly in a burgundy shade, the color of coppery, dry blood.

"I can't _die_, and everybody else I love does. That doesn't leave me with much but to run away."

"Always with the bloody excuses. I have to stop time just in order for us to have a serious conversation," Ianto says, frustrated. "Let me tell you what I think. It's not your fault. Yet still, you don't listen. You hate yourself so much, but you can't outrun time-or me for that matter."

Jack averts his eyes and squeezes them shut.

"We all made our choices, and I never regretted mine," Ianto sighs. "But you could always forget."

And Ianto flickers out of existence. The Doctor finishes his spin and gazes at the empty room.

"There's no one else here except you and me Jack, and Gwen in the bedroom." The Doctor cranes his neck over his shoulder and sees Jack slouched over, his head buried in his hands. He greatly heaves, his shoulders rising and then falling.

"You don't understand," Jack murmurs. "I can't."

* * *

_How much longer Jack?  
_  
"I don't know."

_What now?_

Jack looks up at Ianto. He tightly clasps his hands together and steeples his fingers. "I don't know."

The couch dips. Ianto sits beside him, close but not quite enough.

* * *

_fin._


End file.
